Lots of DSL drops today

[#1]

7 years - old? In terms of available facilities or hardware ageing? No doubt routers have improved enormously in those years. How long the hardware will go on if the connection technology remains compatible? I'd expect decades with solid-state electronics. I still use a forty-year old radio every day and it sounds as good as it did when new. of course, That doesn't rule out the possibility of a fault, but I doubt age is a factor.

Today's stats:

Link Information
			
Uptime:	0 days, 10:15:00
DSL Type:	G.992.3 annex A
Maximum Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]:	1,072 / 3,332
Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]:	444 / 1,944
Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [MB/MB]:	6.46 / 24.11
Output Power (Up/Down) [dBm]:	12.5 / 18.0
Line Attenuation (Up/Down) [dB]:	30.5 / 49.5
SN Margin (Up/Down) [dB]:	24.0 / 8.5
Vendor ID (Local/Remote):	TMMB / IFTN
Loss of Framing (Local/Remote):	321 / 0
Loss of Signal (Local/Remote):	1,638,377 / 0
Loss of Power (Local/Remote):	0 / 0
Loss of Link (Remote):	0
Error Seconds (Local/Remote):	7,340,217 / 0
FEC Errors (Up/Down):	0 / 1,169,548
CRC Errors (Up/Down):	56 / 15,240
HEC Errors (Up/Down):	37 / 122,779

Speed has dropped back again and is still around half normal.

[#2]

Old in terms of hardware ageing. I'd expect any fairly modern piece of consumer-grade IT equipment to have a typical life expectancy of about 5 years at best. 7 years is old enough that it's surprising that it still works at all. The router, and its power supply, will contain lots of capacitors which gradually degrade over time. Things like this were built to be cheap rather than last decades.

[#3]

Honestly, in my opinion I've seen a router last 10 years, but that doesn't mean a router can't ever fail because it's simply a piece of hardware. Other than trying a different router, I'd probably advise to raise a fault to us at http://faults.plus.net as we may need to arrange an engineer visit to investigate the drops.

[#4]

What does the pattern of drops look like this week as compared to last?

[#5]

Your connection for the last 30 days.

[#6]

So, there appear to be periods of a few hours form time to time when connections are repeatedly lost, and these periods particularly occur:

1. At weekends,

2. In Easter week,

3. On the day after the May Day Bank Holiday, or

4. In early morning or late evening, outside the working day.

I can't help thinking there's someone along the route of the line who can sometimes go into work late or come home early, who took Easter week and the Tuesday after May Day off and who's building something using an arc welder in his spare time, but maybe that's just my over-fertile imagination. It might be worth making a fault report because OpenReach might be aware of other users (possibly with different ISPs) suffering similar problems at identical times.

[#7]

Hi kjpetrie, I have tested the line and whilst there are intermittent drop offs they are intermittent. I suggest 2 options, 1st, try a different router, if that resolves it then great but if not then 2nd raise a fault Here

In regards to raising a fault up to BT it is more than likely we will be asked to arrange an engineer appointment because we cannot identify where the fault may be and so I would highly recommend option 1 first if you can.

[#8]

I tried a different router (an old D-Link I inherited from my brother) but I didn't leave it in use long because I got numerous DSL dropouts in the half-hour or so I had it connected, so it certainly didn't improve things. I swapped it back because it has different LAN gateway and DNS addresses and I would have needed to reconfigure all my real and virtual machines to make it work with them all and set up identical port forwarding as well, and that was too much work when it clearly hadn't fixed the fault.

[#9]

The next step would likely be to arrange an engineer.

If you reply to your ticket, our faults team will get back to you.

[#10]

Well, I went through the ticket and the problem remains undiagnosed, but seems to have gone away for now. PN sent me a replacement router and the service improved and became stable after I connected it, but that was odd since I had already had the problem with two different routers, so after a couple of weeks of reliable service I put my Thomson back on the line to see whether the problem returned. After all, there's no point keeping a faulty router as an alternative. However, the Thomson has worked-non stop for over six days now and seems rock solid. I'll continue to watch it, of course, and at least I've got a known new one to test with if problems recur, but I've no reason to suspect any of the three routers I now have is faulty.

I just want to record that the fault doesn't seem to be router-related, as it was present with two different routers including one which is now working well, but it does seem to have gone away for now. Either it has been fixed by an engineer who discovered a problem while checking someone else's line (a related fault, perhaps?) or the intermittent problem has intermittently failed to recur, or whatever was causing the interference has been fixed, or the activity which was generating problems has ceased. Who knows? I will just have to start again if problems resume, but for now, it's working.